House Republicans are pushing legislation to crack down on noncitizen voting, part of an effort to cast doubt on the election results and target immigrants who they say should not be allowed to participate to elections in the United States.
They plan to push through a bill this week that would roll back a law in Washington, D.C., that allowed noncitizens of the nation's capital to vote in local elections. And they are pushing for legislation that would require states to personally obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering a person to vote, and require states to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls.
Neither is likely to pass the Democratic-led Senate or be signed by President Biden, but both are ways for Republicans to draw attention to their false claims of widespread illegal voting by noncitizens.
Former President Donald J. Trump has long claimed, despite evidence to the contrary, that presidential and congressional elections are prone to widespread voter fraud and illegal voting by undocumented immigrants who have skewed the outcomes in favor of Democrats — an accusation that the Republicans in the House of Representatives have expressed. echoed.
Here are the facts about non-citizen voting and the false claims that foreigners are rigging tight elections in one party's favor.
More than a dozen cities and towns across the country allow non-residents to vote in local elections.
There has been a long-standing policy debate in the United States over whether to grant voting rights at the municipal level to foreigners regardless of their immigration status, since most of them pay comparable tax levels to American citizens, contribute to their local economies and send their children to local schools.
Residents with foreign passports can vote for candidates for mayor, school board, city council and commissioner in at least 14 municipalities where the state constitution does not explicitly prohibit noncitizens from voting in local elections. Almost all cities are located in the deep blue states of Maryland, Vermont and California.
Most local measures that give non-citizens access to ballots face legal challenges. One such law in San Francisco is that survived a legal challenge allows undocumented parents to vote for their public school board members. But in 2022, the New York State Supreme Court handed down the verdict a law of New York City which gave partial voting rights to more than 800,000 non-citizens.
Non-citizens rarely vote in local elections, even though they are allowed to do so. In Washington, D.C., where about 15 percent of the 700,000 residents are foreign-born, only about 500 noncitizens had registered to vote as of Monday, according to data from the District of Columbia Board of Elections. The district has more than 400,000 registered voters.
It is illegal – and extremely rare – for non-citizens to vote in federal elections.
Although non-citizens can vote in some local elections, they are prohibited by law from voting in federal elections for president or Congress, and research shows this almost never happens.
A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University looked at the 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 presidential election in more than 40 jurisdictions. only 30 cases of potential voting by non-citizens – or 0.0001 percent of the votes cast.
An audit by the state of Georgia conducted in 2022 came to a similar conclusion after finding fewer than 1,700 cases of non-citizens trying to register to vote in the previous 25 years. None of them were allowed to vote.
David Becker, director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, said states have been “very effective” in ensuring that only U.S. citizens remain on the voter rolls for federal elections. That's largely because of it the Real ID lawrequiring states to verify the immigration or citizenship status of residents before issuing an official identification card.
“There has never been more transparency around this election, and that is verifiable,” Mr. Becker said. “There are very, very few people for whom citizenship status cannot be confirmed.”
Noncitizens have strong disincentives to vote in federal elections.
Registering to vote requires the highest level of oversight from state officials and law enforcement, something undocumented immigrants or those whose legal status in the United States is uncertain are unlikely to want.
Those who have studied this subject say that immigrants have every reason not to draw attention to themselves in this way. Illegal voting is a crime that can carry jail time, a fine and deportation.
If a noncitizen “is caught registering to vote, or voting — this is actually a citizenship exam question — they will be deported,” Mr. Becker said.
Republicans and election deniers have cited erroneous figures to suggest that illegal voting by noncitizens is widespread.
A witness at last week, a hearing in the House of Representatives on election integrity cited an erroneous 2020 report showing that about 15 percent of noncitizens routinely vote in federal elections. The estimate, which election deniers often point to, is based on an earlier survey whose survey data appeared to indicate that a significant share of foreigners voted in 2008.
But those numbers are the result of unscientific cherry-picking of a survey of only 20,000 people designed for a different purpose, says Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, a Washington-based think tank. A closer look at the survey results shows that most respondents who said they were foreigners and had voted in the past were in fact US citizens who had accidentally chosen the wrong answer to the citizenship question.